Comments on: Mark Hostetler, Austrian spammer

By: bag

bag — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 20:12:20 +0000

The Markus Hostetler might be a fake name or a strawman.
The owners of “PeakClick GmbH” seem to be Polish:
Drewniak Wojciech and Olczykowski Marcin, both from Bielsko-Biala (PL)

This is true!

By: Lenderistech » Who is Mark Hostetler

Lenderistech » Who is Mark Hostetler — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 16:01:55 +0000

[…] In case you want to see the full research thread: http://blog.forret.com/2006/06/meet-mark-hostetler-spammer-from-austria/ […]

By: Charles Arthur

Charles Arthur — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 12:05:00 +0000

When we were getting this problem, we simply got in touch with Peakclick, and complained. They took him off within hours. Companies like that hate to have bad Google juju.

If you hit a spammer’s affiliate payment company, that hurts the spammer more than dealing with a few emails.

So you need to figure out the guy’s affiliate ID with Peakclick and any other affiliates he’s with - typically he’ll have a different one in the US for the guestbooks he spams there.
Good luck.

By: Peter

Peter — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 19:20:28 +0000

Answer from Peter Vergote, Legal & Admin Manager, DNS.BE:(my translation)
The person that placed the comment (i.e. Robin Wauters’ comment) refers to our policy concerning “warehousing” schemes during out Nov-Jan promotion campaign.
“Warehousing” is mass registering of domainnames with as sole purpose blocking and reselling them for a hefty margin afterwards.

A large number of registered domains have indeed been cancelled afterwards for that “warehousing” reason. This has however nothing to do with “spamming”.

DNS BE cannot cancel a domain name on the basis of a complaint that the owner would be guilty of spamming. If such an accusation were to have been confirmed by a court or police authority, then we can act against the owner on that basis.

De persoon die de comment plaatste verwijst naar ons optreden tegen “warehousing” praktijken die werden vastgesteld naar aanleiding van onze promotiecampagne gedurende de maanden november tot en met januari. Met warehousing bedoelen we het massaal registreren van domeinnamen met als enige bedoeling deze te bezetten en mogelijks met woekerwinsten door te verkopen aan geïnteresseerden.

Naar aanleiding van “warehousing”-praktijken hebben we inderdaad een groot aantal domeinnamen die tijdens de promotiecampagne geregistreerd werden opnieuw laten annuleren. Deze actie had echter niets te maken met spamming.

DNS BE kan niet zomaar een domeinnaam annuleren op basis van een klacht dat de domeinnaamhouder zich schuldig zou maken aan “spamming”. Indien dergelijke aantijging effectief werd bevonden door de bevoegde rechtbank of politiedienst dan kunnen we op basis daarvan actie ondernemen tegen de houder van de domeinnaam.

By: Robert Wetzlmayr

Robert Wetzlmayr — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 18:00:48 +0000

The Austrian law covering the aspects of spam (mainly e-mail spam, though) is available in full text from ris1.bka.gv.at.
This is a national implementation of current EU regulations. Maximum penalty is 37.000 EUR, so you will doubtlessly find a lawyer acting in your case.

HTH,

Robert

By: Robin Wauters

Robin Wauters — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 13:51:05 +0000

@ Hans Leyten: I was working as Internet Marketing Manager for Hostbasket during the free .be-campaign, and just wanted to correct:

SOME official registrars (the ones who agreed with the terms and signed contracts with DNS) gave away AS MUCH free domain names AS THEY WANTED (not necessarily 5). The period for the campaign was 1 November 2005 until 31 January 2006.

All registrars had to agree not to allow cybersquatting and reporting to DNS if they noticed something fishy. I’m assuming EuroDNS didn’t, although DNS did react thoroughly if a registrars reported dubious attempts by freeing up the domain names right away.

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 04:14:44 +0000

Good luck with the hunt! I am using Spam Karma 2 and it’s doing quite nicely, but blog spam is still out of control. I am actually considering turning off comments on one of my blogs, but that would really upset some of the regulars.

By: Österreichischer Spammer — Software Guide

Österreichischer Spammer — Software Guide — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 22:28:38 +0000

[…] 21. Juni 2006 Peter Forret berichtet, wie er einem österreichischen Spammer auf die Spur gekommen ist. Auslöser war Akismet-Spam, wo erstaunlich viele .be-Domainnamen auffielen (dies hatte ich letztens auch sehr vermehrt festgestellt). […]

By: Dan

Dan — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 21:36:44 +0000

One of the pluses of Wordpress software is that it has a setting for comments that you can select that automatically dumps any comment which contains a URL, whether it’s a trackback or a direct comment, into moderation. It does mean you still get stuck seeing the spam, but all of it is in a moderation cue, which is quick and easy to glance at, and you can select “all” and delete “all” in a matter of seconds.

By: Martin

Martin — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 20:19:55 +0000

Mark I recieved more than 20.000 spam comments in 3 months (my site is up since October 2005). It is getting tiresome to manually control all comments (more than 2000 already) although Spam Karma 2 is doing a very good job to keep most spam out.

Still I´am getting sick of the spammers and also be interested to know if we could sue them. I´am not recieving *.be spam but many *.pl comments. Blacklisted all those domains but they seem to be producing hundreds of domains every week.

If you find something out let me know, I´ll be glad to provide my spam karma log and server logfiles if needed.

By: Darren McLaughlin

Darren McLaughlin — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 11:37:36 +0000

How can making comments be illegal? Sure, it may ANNOY you, but breaking the law is entirely different.

That being said, good work on at least annoying them back.

By: cris

cris — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 09:37:19 +0000

Terrific research. I’ll bookmark this site to stay updated.